[Info-vax] x86-64 VMS: One piece of software no-one has asked for yet

[Alan Frisbie]

On 08/30/2014 05:00 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:

> I don't know what the rules are like in the US, but here in the UK,
> I would expect the auditor to raise a major red flag if there wasn't
> an audit trail back to the rules (in the form of source code) which
> were used to generate the figures.
>
>> The program with the lost source really needs recreating so that it's
>> auditable.

The use of TECO in this case is entirely in "batch" mode, using a
canned set of macros.   When I said "regulatory", what I really should
have said was "tax-related", in this case for their payroll and 401K
filings.   The report in question is produced by the payroll program.
It was purchased as a canned package, so of course they don't have the
source.   It was far cheaper to extract the required fields from the
giant report text file than to have the vendor create a custom summary
report.

The TECO macros are carefully documented, character-by-character, so
that any interested person can see exactly what they are doing.
(I did this as much for my own sanity as for any auditing purpose!)
Nothing is done manually, except for submitting the batch job that
does everything, and even that is done with a command file.

So, no, nobody at the site ever sees a TECO prompt or issues any
TECO commands.   It just happens to be a useful and powerful text
processing language that does the job well.

Alan